EMC RecoverPoint for VMs is a virtualized hypervisor-based replication and disaster recovery solution that is integrated into the VMware. Virtual RecoverPoint appliances is installed on existing ESXi servers with and ESXi splitter that resides on all servers with protected workloads, allowing replication and recovery at the virtual disk (VMDK and RDM) level. Since the I/O splitter resides within the vSphere hypervisor, RecoverPoint for VMs can replicate VMs to and from any storage array supported by VMware: SAN, NAS, DAS, and vSAN.

This blog will cover protecting VMs but first you must have the following prereqs completed.

• ESXi splitter installed on each esxi host
• iSCSI network setup
• vRPAs deployed at each site
• RP clusters deployed
• RP Datastore Journals at each site registered

RPforVMs is accessed via the Web Client and there is not thick client option.  The vSphere Web Client Plugin is installed once the RP cluster has been deployed

Protecting VMs

Right-click on a VM, All RPVWCPlugin Actions, Protect

You can also go to Manage and then RecoverPoint for VMs

Protect VM Wizard begins.  Start with creating a new Consistency Group or add to an existing Consistency Group.

Enter a name for the Consistency Group and select the source cluster

Define the Protection Policy.  Create a new VM or an existing VM and set the replication mode.

  

Select the resource where the target VM is to be created

 

Select the Target Datastore

 

Configure the Journals for both the Source and Target.

 

Complete the Protection Wizard

Initialization Process will begin.  There are 2 options: Modify Group Policy and Modify Link Policy

 

Modify Group Policy.  Here you can specify the vRPA and the Priority Level.

Modify Link Policy.  Here you decide the Replication Mode as well as the Bandwidth Reduction. Compression and dedup requires 8 vCPU and 8GB Memory on each vRPA.

You can go back to the RecoverPoint for VMs tab and monitor the Replication process.  A VM will be created at the target with a .copy.recoverpoint added to it.

My next blog will cover Testing a Copy